The latest features, essays, interviews from our contributing writers and editors.
“Having a strong sense of smell allows one to decipher certain truths about a thing, unless one has detached from oneself.” —Elizabeth A.I. Powell
“I work with language (in its many shapes/contexts, e.g., words, the news; visible/invisible; etc.) and towards finding language capable of holding paradox, of holding everything (like a painting, like a house).” —Christine Herzer
“When a black woman poet refuses punctuation, she is refusing more than standard English. She is also refusing to allow the marks of history to (over)determine her writing.”
“Poetry gives you the room to explore these weird juxtapositions where you’re talking about a transit-oriented development, and you’re simultaneously talking about Athena. She rides a chariot, and we’re riding a bullet train.” —Josh Feit
Ceballos captures the violent reality oppressed and exploited people face due to U.S. involvement in their home country’s economy and politics that force them to eventually leave. Through elegies, we’re made aware of the horrors they face after fleeing to the U.S.
“I’m fascinated in thinking about money as an apparition whose haunting drives earthly creatures to do the silliest of actions, to become the strangest renditions of oneself. Every single person I know, including myself, is haunted by this not-love, this not-woods. I’m just trying not to feel hungry anymore for this kind of haunting, which begins to feel like a part of one’s skin.” —Jessica Q. Stark
“The tension of a palinode comes from admitting a blindness that needs to be addressed—to expose the story of your old poem as a preconceived myth.”
“Bianca is less about ‘the speaker getting back to herself’ and more an account of the speaker getting a chance to create the self on her own terms. To control her narrative. And, also, to grieve the younger self she never really got to be.” —Eugenia Leigh
“In both of my collections, I’ve tried to write a scene as closely as I can without looking away or dragging something else in to contextualize it. I am interested in how a poem can point itself at a moment without giving that moment background to anchor it.” —Taneum Bambrick
“That’s one reason to write poems under fire: to register a human reaction to dehumanizing circumstances. And that’s one reason to translate: to preserve and convey those vital human responses.” –Boris Dralyuk
